I never paid much attention to how photos appear on the web until recently I’ve decided that I need to diversify my income sources by branching out into photography, which has been an old love affair of mine. Over the span of a week or so, I’ve soaked up so much information on just the idea of presentation of colors that it really sickens me how Apple’s Safari (and browsers based on its rendering engine, such as OmniWeb, Shiira among others) is the only browser that gets color renditions correctly according to the artists’ intent. Nine years after the initial dot-com boom and six years after its bust, I can’t believe only ONE technology company gets web-based photography presentation right!
Without getting into too much details, basically the chief complaint is, web browsers like Firefox or Internet Explorer are only capable of displaying a very narrow set of colors that are capable of being displayed by modern monitors. This was done in the old days to insure compatibility of color display between various makes of monitors and applications via which images were rendered. But the “old days” have long gone, and browsers are still stuck in the 1990’s.
Now I understood why my images appeared muddy on Flickr. But since there are way too many of them to fix and re-upload, I’ve gone to hell and back trying everything to make sure the richness of colors captured by my camera is properly displayed on the web. But I think I am only half way there in finding an acceptable work flow that works for me.
So anyway, this is just a rant on one of those tech things….